Quiz time again. And yay!, one question only:
How do you think your relationship will blow up?
Now, this is for all of you. No matter how happy you are in your relationship. No matter how great things are going. No matter how deeply you still are in your honeymoon phase.
This question gets at the issue of preventive maintenance.
So, yes, ideally you’ll cruise along—or limp along—just fine. But suppose, just suppose as a wild, crazy thought, that things started to go wrong, then very wrong, then they blew up, and then suddenly you ended up broken up.
What would have brought that about?
What you have to do is ask yourselves what comes to mind when you ask yourselves this question. Forget how likely it is. But let’s say that you have a teeny-weeny nagging concern about your partner being just a little irresponsible. And this is what comes to mind when you ask yourself this question.
And suppose your partner has this unbelievably infinitesimal concern that you just might, maybe, possibly be a tiny bit high maintenance—whatever that means! And this is what comes to their mind when they think of your relationship ending.
Hints and whispers. I know. But even if that’s all you have to go on, the point of this quiz is that it’s well worth paying attention to right now. Before you get polarized around either of these issues. Before either of them becomes big deals. Before they turn into what you fight about all the time.
None of that has to happen.
Whatever seems like a mere puff of a cloud on the horizon is something you can talk about now more easily than you ever will again. And that’s the most important thing. There is a self-healing mechanism in your relationship. And that is
Identifying a problem
Talking about the problem
Dealing with the problem
But any couple’s ability to do that is all about how big the problem is. We’ve learned a phrase from this pandemic: viral load. If you are subjected to a small dose of a coronavirus, say by passing someone on the street for a few seconds in the open air, your immune system has a WAY better chance of dealing with it than if you are subjected to a huge dose, say by your hanging out in a crowded bar for five hours.
So really this quiz is a way of pointing to something so you can say to each other, “You know, this may be small now, but I’m afraid it could turn into something big. What can we do now so that doesn’t happen?”
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